Blog Comments & Posts

I'm with you on this one.But, it's a fine, fine line sometimes. If a user types a query into a search engine and is actually *looking* to find an ad, then it's inbound. But, most users don't go to search engines to find the right "contextual" ads.

Jon: On behalf of the community, Rand and I -- thanks very much for taking the initiative to just go ahead and do it. It was a very "inboundy" thing to do.

If the site even helps a few great organizations connect to a few awesome inbound marketers, it will have been well worth the effort. You're changing lives/careers here.

By the way, I get most of the blame for being lukewarm when you first approached us. It's not that I didn't like the idea (I LOVE the idea, and have been pondering something like it for 2+ years). The issue was that I was already feeling guilty for not committing as much time as I would have liked to the site -- and this would have made me feel even guiltier (and most of the weight would have fallen Rand's shoulders -- who's already doing way more than his fair share). Just thought you should know.

Disclaimer: I'm the co-founder of HubSpot and the "Dharmesh" referred to in the article.

Rather than replying to individual comments, I'm going to try and jump in with some broader points.

1. The term SEO is useful, descriptive and accurate. I think Rand's point here (and I agree with it) is that we should not dilute its meaning by overloading it. SEO has evolved -- and the practice of SEO definitely includes more activities now than it once did.

SEO -- the term and the industry is continuing to grow. Long live SEO!

2. The fact that HubSpot coined the term should not matter. It's either useful or it's not -- it should stand on its own merit. Being against the term because a specific individual/company came up wiith it amounts to a form of an ad hominem argument. [Note: This would be different if the term was trademarked or being otherwise "protected" from use. Such is not the case. All are free to use it].

3. The fact that HubSpot happens to rank well for the term shouldn't dissuade people. This article already ranks well for the term "inbound marketing". And, since when did SEOs start backing off from using a term just because some other organization (temporarily) happened to be ranking well for it? I fully expect SEOmoz to kick our butt long-term in the rankings. :)

4. Lets remember that we're having this discussion on the SEOmoz blog -- which, unsurprisingly has a lot of passion for the term SEO. And, I'll reiterate that neither Rand nor I are looking to *replace* the term SEO. Having said that, lets remember that the community here is not a representative sample of the world at large -- you folks are much more knowledgeable than the average person.

5. When we were originally pondering this concept, we considered just using online marketing or internet marketing. The reason we didn't go that path was that the terms were too broad and vague and didn't capture the essence of what we were looking to describe. In hindsight, organic marketing (or something else) may have been arguably better. But, I still think there was (and is) a need for something more specific than just internet marketing or online marketing.

6. For what it's worth, we've been using the term with mainstream audiences for many years now. It has resonated with normal people. They may not know exactly what it means from reading it, but it's relatively easy to explain and it seems to "stick".

Overall, it seems that we're in general agreement about the underlying concept of inbound marketing. If the label is useful to you, and you see fit to use it, great! If not, that's totally OK (of course). Please keep doing awesome work -- whatever you call it.

I'm saddened to hear that because Rand and I are doing a decent job using the term "inbound marketing" that it dissuades you from using it. Our hope would be the exact opposite.

My hope was that by having a relatively convenient term that does a reasonable job describing what is a relatively new "bundle" of concepts, and having helping educate a bunch of lay people (i.e. customers) about it, it would make people's lives easier.

One example: Lets say you have a phenomenally great product, and people start spreading the word on social media. The visitors/leads/customers you get from this would be (in my mind) inbound marketing. But, technically, you didn't really create content to drive that attention. So, it's not really content marketing.

What would be even awesomer is if you dropped some of the things that you think might have caused you to take the lead in the Rand-Will present-off. You're in the lead for good reasons. Chances are, Rand already knows what those reasons are, so why not share with the rest of us?

Just about all of your criticism (much related to our CMS) is pretty well placed.

Your conclusion is also pretty accurate. For folks that are web developers (or super-savvy), HubSpot is often not a great fit. Our happiest customers are those that broadly need many of the capabilities HubSpot provides, but don't have the technical sophistication to assemble the pieces themselves. If you just use us for the CMS, we're never going to compare favorably to WordPress.

As it turns out, there are hundreds of thousands of businesses that need a simple web presence, draw some traffic in through search and social media, put up simple landing pages with forms, collect lead data into a database, nurture their email subscribers and analyze how all that is going. And, though much of this can be accomplished by great "best of breed" tools (like WordPress and Google Analytics), putting all that stuff together is non-trivial. Our mission is to help those mainstream businesses and make the power of internet marketing available to them.

In each of our individual apps, there are limitations. Our strategy is to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts.

1. HubSpot primarily focuses on small businesses who are often relatively new to inbound marketing -- and are encountering SEO for the first time. We're on a mission to help educate the market that inbound marketing works -- which I think helps all of us.

2. On the SEO front, our tools are nowhere near as sophisticated as SEOmoz. In fact, I'm a SEOmoz Pro member myself and we use some of the moz data in the HubSpot product.

3. Unless you're using several of the applications in the HubSpot suite (like lead management and forms), the price is usually prohibitive.

I totally agree. Software is not going to be able to produce great content for you, nor attract quality links, nor buld and expand your online community in social media. Only people can do those things.

All software does is make those people more productive, identify opportunities (by telling you what's working and what's not) and channel your limted resources.

In terms of us encouraging customers (and potential customers) to use our lead management and tracking -- guilty as charged! We're really passionate about the *integration* of various marketing apps into a single platform. Lead management is a big piece of that. However, we don't provide a full CRM solution (we integrate to leaders in the CRM space for that -- like Salesforce.com, NetSuite and SugarCRM).

One aspect that you didn't get to, but wish you would have, is the notion of "sponsored" speaking slots. Not sure how common that is, but my understanding is that at some conferences, many of the panels (or even solo sessions) are made up of those who we were willing to write a check.

It troubles me when folks pick speakers for something other than their expertise and ability to deliver value to the audience.

1) Many VCs don't like to do B rounds. The rationale is that the "price" they need to pay is disproportionate to the risk still in the business. They'd rather do "A" rounds (though much higher risk, the potential rewards are greater) or do later rounds.

2) Geography is a major issue.

The combination (trying to raise a B round outside of your geography) is particularly tough. We ran into some of the same issues in our B round as well.

Thanks for a great article. It's humbling to see this level of contribution to the startup community.

Lets assume that the probability that any given site will link to your content is a function of the quality of the content. The better your content, the more likely someone is to link to it -- all other things being equal.

However, the *actual* number of links you get will of course be in part dependent on how many people are exposed to the content in the first place.

So, even if your content is so brilliant that 100% of the people that see it link to it, if only 2 people see it, you're not going to get very far.

I'd posit that the essence of rankings is to have a balance between great content and ensuring that enough people see it.

However, the book is talking more about marketing/leads not sales/customers. Even in industries where hand-holding is required, the real question is: How do you reach your customers in the first place?

I'd also add that we're not suggesting that inbound marketing replaces outbound marketing completely. Just that over time, it's likely that inbound marketing approaches will be more efficient and effective at drawing in prospective customers than outbound ones. As a society, we're become more and more difficult to reach through classical outbound methods.

For example, most of the people I know don't answer calls from strange numbers anymore (they first check their Caller ID). This was not the case 20 years ago.

Now that the book has been out for a few days, we've found that it is a very popular tool for helping convince others that things like SEO and building great content are worth investing in.

Though the book is not likely to teach readers of this blog about SEO (our treatment of the topic is basic), it would likely be a good "gift" to executives (and if you're a consultant, clients) to help them see the value in what SEOs have to offer.

Very useful content and you were right about most things. The only part that I disagreed with is the "their time is worth more than your time, so if they're spending time with you, they're interested..." part.

That's not necessarily true. If a VC has an interest in a particular sector and is trying to learn, or they're dating one level of hotness about themselves (i.e. your deal is hotter than they are), it's entirely possible for them to spend a bunch of time with you even though they're not likely going to do a deal.

Gives me some good food for thought for the upcoming SEOmoz Pro training presentation on startups.

Well, we don't have to call it a sandbox, but I'm not convinced that there's *something* that feels an awful lot like a sandbox phenomenon as the way people describe it, actually out there.

I don't think it's a total myth.

Even putting this particular case/example aside, I've experienced similar things before and the behavior seems to be identical to what we're talking about here. Seems to apply only to new domains (or newly transferred domains) and the effect is very, very real.

But, that's just me. We're all entitled to our opinions and theories. Mine just happen to be less informed than most (but I love them just the same). :)

I thought I had done a considerable amount of work in making sure not to have "bad SEO", but looks like I missed a few spots.

I'm not sure there are duplicate content issues (if you saw any, would appreciate your pointing them out).

I've gone through just about all the links and ensure that I'm not giving away clean (dofollow) links where we should't be. That should be fixed.

As for the badges problem, I don't see this as being a "scam". Badges are installed at a user's discretion (they're not auto-installed as they would be for a theme/skin or something else). So, the user is aware of them and makes a choice. My understanding was that as long as users are not "tricked" into having badges on their site, it's OK.

On the topic of badges, I'd expect those backlinks to get discounted heavily (makes sense), but do you think they actually hurt? Should I put a no-follow on the badge code that I provide to users? It'll feel a little weird no-following my own links. :)

In any case, thanks for your help. Will get some of that stuff cleaned up.

Good points. We should have been better about some of the core SEO issues. This was a bit of an experimental project and it ended up just taking off. I spent too much time on coding the features instead of thinking (as I should have) more about the SEO.

The rationale for the sub-domain was that the name of the site "reads" better. We wanted to move away from new domains for each app in the family (TwitterGrader.com, WebsiteGrader.com, etc.) to at least have a common base domain: website.grader.com, twitter.grader.com as in our experience, getting sub-domains to rank is a much easier process. And, we expect to launch several more "graders" over time.

The rationale for sub-domains vs. sub-folders was more out of user-friendliness. We felt that for an application called "Twitter Grader", the URL twitter.grader.com would make more sense than "grader.com/twitter". It just "reads" better as a sub-domain.

Based on all the comments here, I'm making another go at getting some of the SEO issues cleared up. That, combined with some other powerful links that came in today (including the one from SEOmoz) should help things along.

In our experience, when a domain transfers to a new owner, with clearly different content on it from what was there, it gets treated as "new" and goes through the sandbox process much like a brand-new domain.

For domains that are new but just a "rebranding" (only domain name change, no content change), the transfer of the 301link value still took a few months and rankings were lost during that period.

The Google sandbox is an interesting phenomenon. I understand the motivation behind it, but it seems that in many situations (like with grader.com), there are sufficient signals of quality and non-spaminess that the site should at least be able to rank for non-competitive keywords.

Makes no sense to me that twitter.grader.com (a PR5 and a mozRank of 4.7) can fail to rank well for a search on "twitter grader".

Will be interesting to see how this plays out and how long it takes.

Meanwhile, if anyone has been tracking the frequency of these "sandbox releases", I'd be curious to hear about it.

At the risk of sounding defensive,I'm going to provide a few counter-points. (Note: These counter points are not to suggest that I don't think SEO is important, I do -- but I think open debate is important).

1. Though you definitely "qualify" as a startup (and a successful one at that), you are hardly representative of the typical startup when it comes to judging the value of SEO. You SELL SEO products/services. Your potential customers are much more likely to be addressable through SEO efforts than that of other types of businesses.

2. The argument that the authors of the articles you picked out (including me) are either (a) idiots, (b) coy or (c) have not experienced the benefits of SEO is not convincing. Are these the only possible reasons they don't specifically use the term "SEO" in their articles? It's frankly unlike you to make sweeping statements like this that are unsupported.

Let me offer an alternate view:

For many early-stage startups, the big predictor of success is not whether you can use SEO (or not). It's about finding a market and delivering value to that market. As it turns out for MANY startups, there is no existing search term that has enough traffic to show up on any radar -- because the idea is reasonably novel and people are just not searching on it -- yet. To base a startup on search keyword discovery does not seem optimal. If you're tapping existing markets, sure, it might make sense. What if you're doing something truly new?

Further, given limited time in the early daysof a startup, I'd argue that the BEST way for a startup founder to leverage the internet for marketing is to create a unique and differentiated "voice". Blog about the market opportunity. Say something interesting. Draw out feedback from your target market. It's MUCH more important to actually produce this differentiated content and build an audience. Can SEO help with this? Sure. But, it's not the do-all, end-all.

Summary: Startups should definitely use SEO (as it's a great way to reach a market -- much better than other channels). But, picking the right keywords is much less important than picking the right customers (market).

I'm disappointed in myself. Despite being a very big advocate of SEO (and inbound marketing in general), it is not coming through in my writing on OnStartups.com .

In my defense, I'd say that I'm a big believer in SEO, but the primary article cited was dealing with a higher level abstraction (not talking about SEO, but definitely saying that classic "outbound" marketing just doesn't work well). Though I didn't use the term SEO, I did say "Don't look for customers, help them find you".

But, point well taken. Next time I talk about marketing, I'll be sure to actually use the term SEO.

I have read the book and had an uneasy feeling for about 90% of it. To me, it just felt too much like it was targeted towards folks to which get-rich-quick schemes and "make money in your sleep!" type offerings appeal.

For the vast majority of the population, this simply doesn't work (as you noted, most endeavors require that you actually create value). For most of the rest, they don't really need this kind of advice.

We thought people would be much more likely to pay attention to and link to a blog that was not directly attached to a corporate identity. Since we were disciplined about not using the blog as a strong "sales" tool (more to establish though leadership in our market), I think this worked well.

Now that we've built some readership (the early days are the hardest), we're considering merging the blog back into our corporate domain via a 301.